Kicked off server – can anyone tell me what’s happening?

Hi! I run a moderately busy poliblog (1000-2000 hits a day), using WordPress. My server has recently kicked me off, saying that my blog was too much stress or traffic or something.

Here’s the info I got from the server. I’m pretty computer-illiterate – can anyone tell me in plain English what’s going on? Have I got WordPress set wrong somehow? Did I go through a DoS attack? Or do I just need to find a better server?

Many thanks!

Hello,

we suspended and moved your account to “Quantz” server because of the following reasons.

Too many php processes and mysql connections caused Europa to hang.
Here are the log files from Europa:

Hence we moved you to Quantz first to solve the issue of the degraded service on Europa and second as a courtesy in order to prevent any downtime on your site to allow you time to rectify the situation. Currently, your site is not suitable for a shared hosting environment.

Again they have flaunted on front page their $7.95/mo managed hosting with unlimited domains.
But when you dig deeper, it is $9.95 /mo together with $49.95 setup fee!

It is $7.95 only if you pay 2 years’ hosting charges upfront. But they won’t tell you about this catch on the first page!

And the home page claims “unlimited Domains”. But the details page says it is only 3 domains.

And they have referral pyramid shemes! (schemes, eh?)

Please do some research before pitching your tent. Though hosting prices are falling by the wayside, moving lock, stock and barrel to another place to roost every other day is a pain – path, permissions, upload, database set up et al!

Kichu, you have a vendetta against DreamHost don’t you? The last time you went into this, most of the thread was deleted. In fact, you’ve pretty much copied and pasted what you tried to post last time. Do you keep this in a text file for every time someone mentions DreamHost? Now, let me correct your poorly-researched assumptions.

Look at this:- Earn Free cash! Start referring new customers. And you will earn $97 instantly! (yes, $97, no sic!)

You only get the $97 after the customer have paid a full year. Considering how many DH customers make use of the referral program, this is no major loss to DH.

Sign up today and triple your bandwidth and disk space!

Bandwidth and disk space are cheap, especially on shared hosting plans in which the users rarely reach their maximum.

Again they have flaunted on front page their $7.95/mo managed hosting with unlimited domains. But when you dig deeper, it is $9.95 /mo together with $49.95 setup fee!

You didn’t dig far enough. If you pay monthly, it is $9.95/mo, but if you pay 2 years upfront, it works out to be $7.95/mo. As for the setup fee, every good host has one. $49.95 is a bit steep, but $7.95 is also a bit low.

And the home page claims “unlimited Domains”. But the details page says it is only 3 domains.

The homepage claims that you get “Unlimited domain and mail forwarding”. And, you do get unlimited domain forwarding.

And they have referral pyramid schemes! (schemes, eh?)

What’s wrong with having a “systematic plan of action”? That is what the definition of “scheme” is.

Disclaimer:I have no reason to support DreamHost other than the fact that they host eight of my sites, and I haven’t had a single problem with any of them.

<cite>Any posts ripping into hosts or otherwise being hostile WILL be deleted. Okay ?</cite>
Okay, but kindly consider adding “sponsoring hosts” too.
My dig was triggered by that.
No “vendetta” (God, I dunno which part of the globe they are!), nothing personal too. I believe I am doing a genuine service by pointing out these things, but only when some hosts are getting projected. May be because I have a bit of bad experience with a couple of them earlier.
My case rests!
Peace!
S.K

– Lunarpages seems to have this issue. Other companies that have WP on their servers do not have problems it would seem, especially given the number of WP blogs out there.
– Lunarpages are not indicating whether this load was sustained high level or short spikes, or indeed a single solitary spike. Each of those could indicate different problems.
– It could be related to plugins, but again there are 1000’s of plugi users without issues.

If I were on Lunarpages, I would backup everything today, and then keep regular backups. (Actually, if I were on there, I’d be looking for somewhere else.)

Ask your hosts for LOTS of details about the situation. Get log files if possible. It doesn’t matter if you can’t understand them, there are people here who can.

If they do shut you down and you need help transferring databases, post here or email me and I’ll help you out.

I’m the one who’s hosting Acrylamid’s blog. It’s just a standard apache2+php4 installation with mysql on a separate server..

I get about three(!) sql connections from the vanilla blog without any plugins (other than the standard ones, I’m told) and after the queries the apache process spikes for about 3-5 seconds and then the page is sent, rather slow actually.

If it’s an configuration issue then everyone running the not-so-modified installation of apache2+php on debian are having issues.

What kind of logs do you people need? MySQL logs, apache logs, etc? They don’t say much. PHP is a bitch to debug..so I will leave the bughunting to you guys.

If a developer is interested in tracking the problem down, please e-mail me and we can excange information and logs or something..

Thats nice. A pro active positive response from the host with courtesy and the info. If we can all hold back the ranting long enough we might at last get to the bottom of this. It has happened several times before.

As a regular reader and occasional contributor to your blog, I’m sorry to hear you are having problems. I have a couple of suggestions:

(1) There are blogs/hacks that prevent trackback spam flooding. I don’t know if this is what you experienced, but I know my blog was flooded and it took me a while to get under control. These hacks work by preventing too many comments or trackbacks within a given amount of time. The SpamKarma plugin seems to work pretty well, although I just discovered it the other day.

(2) My web host is Hostmatters.com and I’ve been very happy with them. But then, my blog doesn’t get nearly as much traffic as yours.

Thanks, Luhmann. I have occasionally been flooded with spam (who hasn’t?), but nothing recently that would account for this.

And thanks to everyone here for help & advice.

We’ve opened up a TotalChoice Hosting account, and right now I’m trying to figure out how to transfer the blog according to the instructions Macmanx linked to. I’ll probably be back asking for help with that, but I’m going to try to do it myself first.